


The Idea of the Flame

by amo_amare



Category: Last Unicorn (1982), Last Unicorn - All Media Types, Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:09:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amo_amare/pseuds/amo_amare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Schmendrick and Lír share a fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Idea of the Flame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhuia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhuia/gifts).



> I should have re-read this book ages ago. :) I hope my little story does it justice. Happy Yuletide!

He was alone, save for the living darkness of the castle, which scuttled and hurried around him on tiny clawed feet. It stood between his voice and the cold stone walls of the corridor, softening the echo and muffling his footsteps. Since Lír was a child, he’d talked out loud to himself. Anything to take up space in the living, breathing darkness; anything to hear a human voice amongst the scratching and sighing of the dark, black night.

Do it for long enough, and you get good at it: talking to fill the silence. He’s had years of practice, saying anything and everything that came into his head. Were he alone, he could talk for hours without cease. As for talking to other people, well: that took a different kind of practice. Talking to Amalthea was too much like talking to himself.

His footsteps on the smooth stone steps sounded far away, as if they came from a different set of feet. As he walked, he mumbled: “Love, glove, dove...clove is a sight rhyme. Does her hair smell like clove? No, no; more like cobwebs and rain. Pain, drain, vein... ‘I would open up a vein.’” Bitterly, he shook his head. “That won’t do. I already know she’s not impressed by bloodshed...”

The kitchen door appeared before him sooner than he expected, though he hardly bothered with expectations anymore. This castle had a way of disappointing them. Nothing was ever where you expected to find it.

Orange and yellow light danced beneath the heavy iron and oak of the kitchen doorway, and it gave him hope. He could smell wood smoke and cooking over the usual dank sourness of the air. Expecting to find Molly busying herself among the pots and the dried herbs, he pushed the door open without pause.

She wasn’t there. Instead, he found Schmendrick, hunching over the kitchen table and murmuring to himself. Lír couldn’t quite make out the words, which sounded like Latin. As he listened, the pace of the words grew faster, and Schmendrick’s voice louder. What began as a soft, lisping whisper grew into a hailstorm of hollow, reverberating syllables that resonated off the iron tea kettle and the fastenings on the door. Schmendrick himself seemed to grow with them, his limbs lengthening and his face stretching lean with age. The iron sang and the walls shook, a tidal wave building into a deafening crescendo and then...

Nothing. The incantation was over. The room was as it had been, with the young fool of a magician sitting lonely at the long plank table, sighing into the knotted wood.

Finally broken from the spell, Lír began to back out of the room quietly before Schmendrick could notice he was there.

The magician’s voice stopped him. “Well, you came down here for something. You may as well come in and find whatever it was.” His voice was weary, and for a moment, Lír could picture the aged sorcerer who’d been sitting in his place just moments before.

Lír cleared his throat and turned his leather boot toward the empty hallway. “No, it was nothing...I didn’t mean to disturb you. I didn’t know you were...”

“A parlour trick,” Schmendrick insisted. “Just...practicing for King Haggard.” He accompanied his words with a juggling act, plucking two onions and a potato from a basket sat at his elbow. They circled the air once, twice, before disappearing altogether and reappearing as a trio of red apples. The impromptu stunt did nothing to mask the bitterness in his voice.

At Lír’s hesitation, his voice softened. “Come in, boy: I could use the company.”

The same was true for Lír. Slowly, he nodded and made his way over the threshold. The kitchen, though drafty as the rest of the place, was warm. The yellow light of the cooking fire chased the scurrying beasts of the darkness from the room. The air in here was still and empty. Lír felt lighter for the lack of ghosts.

Schmendrick sensed this change in the prince’s mood. He gestured to the bench at the table across from him, and watched with curious eyes as the boy settled himself and began chewing on one of the apples Schmendrick had conjured for his juggling trick. “Down for a midnight snack?” he asked.

Lír shook his head, and answered around a mouthful of fruit. “No, I was looking for Molly. She’s not gone to bed, has she? Is she asleep?”

One of the apples had been bruised during Schmendrick’s juggling display. He rubbed his thumb across the soft, brown spot, mumbling words that should have restored the flesh to juicy firmness. Instead, his thumb broke through the thin skin, and warm brown liquid spilled over his fingers. He sighed, and raised his face to Lír’s. “Gone to bed, yes; as for sleep, I couldn’t say. I begin to think that nothing sleeps during the night in this castle.”

His tone was ominous, but Lír paid no heed. “You’re right about that, I think. The castle herself comes alive in the darkness, and I’ve not met a soul who could sleep easy in her presence.” He finished the last bite of apple, and threw the core onto the smouldering fire. It hissed and spat, and filled the kitchen with a pleasant smell of baking which reminded Lír of his wandering’s object. There was a verse in his pocket he’d counted on sharing with Molly tonight.

The wood felt rough and uneven beneath the smooth parchment he spread on the table in front of him. He’d been working on this all week; he was eager to share it with Amalthea in the morning. 

“Since Molly has gone to bed, maybe you could take her place. See, she often reads my poetry for me...”

Schmendrick tossed his bruised apple onto the fire beside Lír’s core. He laughed softly, and shook his head. “No, I’m sorry: I’m not one for poetry, I’m afraid.”

Disappointment drew Lír’s shoulders down into a slump. Still, he nodded in acceptance and resignation. “That’s all right. I fear I’m not really one for poetry, either.”

Schmendrick was willing to leave the conversation there, but Lír pressed on. “Your niece - the Lady Amalthea - is there no way I can reach her?”

In the fire’s grate, the apple’s skin burst with a pop, and the sweet-burnt smell of the fruit filled the air. Schmendrick inhaled deeply; the scent reminded him of childhood, though how long ago that was now he couldn’t remember.

Lír was still waiting for him to speak; sadness and expectation were knit across his brow. He was still clad in the thick leather jerkin he wore beneath his armor. Mingled with the wood smoke and roasting apples he could detect the smell of old sweat and dried blood: the remnants of another day’s crusade in pursuit of the strange girl Schmendrick called niece.

Taking pity, he shrugged, and reached to clasp the boy’s arm. “I do not believe the man has been born who could answer Amalthea’s sorrow - no matter how valiantly he did try.”

It wasn’t the answer Lír wanted. He rose from the bench to pace the room in agitation. “But have you no advice? You are a man, as far as I can tell, though I must confess I do not know how many years you count behind you...but you must know what I feel! You must have loved...”

Schmendrick laughed. “Love! No...perhaps. That is...”

Lír stopped his pacing to await Schmendrick’s answer.

The wizard rubbed his ageless face, and thought back many years. “I have loved...or lusted, maybe. But maidens were never my specialty. And Amalthea...well, she is a maiden of uncommon virtue.”

Lír nodded in sorrowful agreement. He leaned against the hearthstones and watched the flicker of the dying flames dance amongst the copper pots hung behind Schmendrick’s seat.

“I feel as if I’d been asleep before you came. What life had I been living? What was I _for_? My life was nothing-- _I_ was nothing! For her, though: for her I would be more. For her I would be a hero.”

All the while, Schmendrick’s head had been nodding along to Lír’s speech. He waited for the boy’s eyes to meet his own before answering. “So would I.”

“She deserves better than the both of us.”

The words hung between them and faded into the slowly-dimming light from the fire. In spite of the heat, Lír shivered.

“This castle has always been cold. These last few weeks, it only grows colder. I feel...not the cold. My whole life I have lived with the cold. Now it’s the absence of warmth that I feel.”

The wet, damp sadness of the prince’s words weighed heavy on Schmendrick’s heart. He rose from the bench at the table and stood in front of Lír. He grasped his arm, and waited for him to return his gaze. In the other man’s eyes, Schmendrick could count the loneliness of each of his own unnumbered years.

Without another thought, he raised his hand to cup Lír’s face - hard, calloused hands meeting baby soft cheek. Schmendrick leaned in slowly and pressed his lips, warm and dry, against the prince’s. Lír did not pull back, but leaned into the simple kiss like a flower seeking the sun. When their lips parted, Schmendrick leaned his forehead against the prince’s.

“Do not look to Amalthea. She would set the world on fire, but has not the spark to warm her own heart.”

Lír thought about his words, and raised a hand to savor the lingering flush of heat upon his lips. It was only just a moment, but when he came back to himself, the magician was gone. 

When the last of the embers burned low, and the kitchen grew cold, Lír made his way back up the long, stone steps to his own chamber. Only the cold and the living darkness of the castle accompanied him.


End file.
